Social Media

"The Rent Is Too Damn High" Guy Gets a Documentary [VIDEO]

Jimmy McMillan may have been toiling away at his political career for nearly 10 years now, but it took YouTube fame to catapult him into the public eye. Now he's the subject of a new documentary — titled Damn! — premiering in August.

Since the advent of the shareable, Internet video (starting with pre-YouTube classics, like the Star Wars kid), we've been seeing a new brand of star: The Viral Everyman, a unique brand of celebrity whose relevance is not based so much on talent or perseverance, but novelty and entertainment value.

That's the conceit behind Damn! "Documenting this journey, the film is able to raise many difficult, yet critical, questions," says director Aaron Fisher-Cohen. "Are viral hits victimized by the media or are they complicit? Have we all been transformed into attention-mongers, willing to sacrifice dignity for, now quantifiable, views on a screen? What drives some individuals to seek this sort of attention, and what compels society to grant it to certain people over others? How does social media drive these sensational events and people? How is our increasingly diminishing attention span affecting the state of politics?"

The film follows McMillan throughout his 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign, under the now famous — and much-remixed — party and party line, "The Rent Is Too Damn High."

"This is the first documentary that I am aware of that captures a subject as their viral fame unfolds," says Fisher-Cohen. "It exposes how unlimited access to media, and the ability of most individuals to produce their own, has changed both us and the media-conglomerates. While it does not offer any solutions, I believe it highlights how critical it is that these questions be taken seriously."

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